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According to Instagram (GRAPH) documentation, it's straight forward to get the insights of a post or media object (even story).

Unlike the Facebook insights of a post, Instagram (GRAPH) does not provide paid/organic breakdown on a post level for available metrics like impressions and engagement. This creates a big issue for marketing teams because they cannot differentiate organic from paid performance.

Another way to try to hack this is by fetching all related Ads created on this post. I didn't find anyway to read Ads, AdSets or Campaigns related to a post ID. The only way I can think about this is to manually select the Ads related, on a condition that those Ads were created by the same Ad Account we have access to.

So my question is: Is it possible to get organic vs paid breakdown on the performance metrics of an Instagram post through the API?

Nabil Souk
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from Facebook Developer support I know that the Instagram Graph API only reports organic results (so if a IG post received 300 likes, 200 of which from paid activities, an API call for the media insights will only return a value of 100 likes).

At the same time as far as I know the Facebook Ads API only returns the paid performance, not the organic ones.

For this reason you should be able to report the two sources separatedly, since the metrics don't overlap. The problem arises if you need to join the two sources (for example getting the like total of a single post), since as far as I know there's no matching variable between the media from Graph API and the Ads from Facebook Ads

Mich R
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  • Mich, can you please share a reference backing up the first point? That the Instagram Graph API (insights end-point) only returns organic insights. – Nabil Souk Apr 23 '19 at 08:30
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    Hi Nabil, we opened a support request with the Facebook Developers bug report feature when we noticed that the interactions returned by the graph API for a sponsored post were much lower than those we could see from front-end. They answered that graph API only reports on organic results, and so we had to get the paid data from Facebook Ads. Unfortunately that specific support thread was set as private. I searched around and It's kind of implied here: https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2018/01/30/instagram-graph-api-updates/ – Mich R Apr 29 '19 at 12:16
  • Yeah it says in the link you shared "Insights - Help businesses access and analyze valuable metrics about their own Instagram business profile. Enable them to understand and optimize the performance of their organic content on Instagram." Thanks Mich – Nabil Souk May 01 '19 at 06:13
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    A note from 2022 Jun: Instagram Graph API document on [insight](https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram-api/guides/insights) (under section 'limitation') explicitly states that its metrics does NOT include paid data. – lpounng Jun 08 '22 at 08:50